Battlegrounds of Rot and Rust

By ANDY NEWMAN

Published: September 9, 2007

BRIELLE, N.J.

SEAS were calm and the sun shone bright on the dock behind the Shipwreck Grill on a recent Wednesday morning. That meant big crowds out on the reef. It was already late -- nearly 8 a.m. But Steve Nagiewicz dared to hope for an open spot.

''As long as there's nobody on it,'' he said as he made a final check of the diving gear on his chartered boat, ''we're going out to the Travis tug.''

The Travis, a coal-barge towboat that now rests and rots 75 feet beneath the sea, is one of 4,000 artificial reefs speckling the ocean floor off New York and New Jersey -- an archipelago of manmade heaps, unknown to the average landlubber. Barges, cranes, subway cars, army tanks, ice cream trucks, human ashes lovingly encased in concrete: they're all down there, providing footholds for coral and tiny shellfish and havens for bigger fish and lobster, which in turn draw anglers and scuba divers by the thousands.

Thanks to the endless local supply of decommissioned vessels, construction debris, demolished bridges and bedrock dredged from New York Harbor, New Jersey, with its paltry 125-mile coastline, now boasts the East Coast's largest artificial-reef complex. It covers nearly 850 acres of ocean bottom -- an area the size of Hoboken carpeted in barnacles. Long Island's reefs blanket around 200 more acres.

That may sound like a lot of reef, and it's still growing. But the undersea frontier is increasingly crowded, and therefore increasingly contested.

From Atlantic Beach to Ocean City, sport fishermen say they constantly snag lines on commercial lobster traps. Lobstermen tell of broken-off hooks and sinkers flying up into their faces as they haul traps in. Trawl fishermen say their historic sand-bottomed fishing grounds are being paved with wrecks and rockpiles that tear up their gear. And scuba divers try to steer clear of everyone else.

''There's a lot of pressure on the reefs,'' said Mr. Nagiewicz, 54, a veteran reef advocate who was leading a group of eight divers.

Soon he was looking out across the Sea Girt reef complex, a three-mile chain, three miles from the mouth of the Manasquan Inlet, that includes the Travis and two dozen other wrecks. No one was parked above the Travis, but every few hundred feet stood a boat with one or two shirtless men dangling lines off the back. Here and there, a red-mesh flag marked a submerged line of lobster traps.

Lately, states have moved to ease the crunch. New York is awaiting approval from the Army Corps of Engineers on proposals to expand its reef sites by 66 percent and resume reef-building after a three-year hiatus.

Lawmakers and regulators in Trenton are considering restricting commercial fishing on the reefs for some or all of the year, as many states have done. New Jersey officials, despite concerns about possible asbestos contamination, are also eyeing New York City's old subway cars. (Connecticut needs no artificial reefs -- the Long Island Sound is full of the rocky bottom the reefs are built to imitate.)

But there is no way to satisfy one stakeholder without angering another. Thomas McCloy, the marine fisheries administrator for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, called a seasonal ban on lobster and fish traps ''a compromise that would make nobody real happy.''

Man has been creating reefs to make the seas more productive since at least the 17th century, when the Japanese sank building rubble for kelp to latch onto.

The local reef tradition is strong. A fishing club in Cape May began sinking concrete chunks and bathroom fixtures in 1935. In New York, Al Lindroth, a 77-year-old party-boat captain, recalled the first generation of reefs off the South Shore of Long Island in the 1950s.

''They dumped the McAllister in 50 feet off Long Beach,'' he said. ''I thought, 'Boy, was that a good idea.' And boy, did we catch some fish out there.''

Just about anything that does not immediately dissolve attracts mussels, barnacles, anemones, coral and tube worms.

''They don't seem to care,'' said Bill Figley, a former biologist at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection who started the state's reef program in the 1980s. ''We've examined rubber, steel, concrete, rock, and the colonization rates are about the same. They just need something solid to hang onto.''

Soon they are joined by lobster, crabs, starfish and fish like sea bass.

Artificial reefs do not seem to mean more fish, but they do concentrate them, making them easier to catch.

Local reefs are in deeper, murkier water than those in dive meccas like the Caribbean, so the colors tend to be muted. But a mature reef can be a brilliant oasis. ''You get every color in the spectrum,'' said Adam Altman, secretary of the Long Island Divers Association. ''The typical Northeast fish don't tend to be colorful as tropical fish, but late in the season we get tropical fish.''

From Massachusetts to Florida, artificial reefs cover more than five square miles (about four Hobokens). Most states have little money to build reefs and must rely on donated materials, transportation and labor. In New Jersey, Mr. Figley was blessed with both an eager-to-help sport-fishing community that numbers some 1.3 million, and by the Army Corps of Engineers' decades-long effort to deepen New York Harbor -- dredged bedrock makes up about 90 percent of New Jersey's reefs.